Last week, I published a post about my productivity story and some of the methodologies I used in University and the first years of my career. I finished the blog with the mix of GTD and MIT (Most Important Task) method setup that I had for a while. It was a bit painful to update the three most important tasks for each context each time I completed a task. So, I decided to stop doing it.
After that, it was time to make a change. I started to find more and more limitations in GTD. Mostly, at the moment when I had to decide on which task to work. I wanted some kind of algorithm to pick tasks, because I’m a Computer Engineer, and a great procrastinator, so I trust more in algorithms than myself when picking the next task to work on.
I played with Time Blocking a bit but didn’t quite like it. Filling my calendar with tasks was not helping me, and was giving me more stress when I was supposed to be doing something and I was doing another thing. So I found this article by Francis Wade (he interviewed me about my system once, btw. Very nice guy) about “Temporal Tagging”. This means that GTD contexts are not only the place or tool needed to do something, but also things like the energy you have, the time you need, the mentality, how many people, and more. So I did a thing that for GTD is a sin… adding more than one context to each task. I started only with the amount of time that a task would take me, so it would be easier for me to select a task based on how much time I had before the next meeting. Then I added different classes for a task, for example: tasks that will help me improve myself, chores, work tasks, etc.
So now every time I had to create a task, I had to assign it three different labels (or contexts): the physical one (computer, home), how much time it takes (15m, 30m, 1h), and the class (personal, work, chore). I had some rules, like only one label per kind of context, so a task couldn’t be for work and a chore, but it could be for work and take 15 minutes. Also, my biggest timeframe was two hours, if more, I had to make that task smaller. Time-based tags were great for picking up tasks when I had 15 minutes before a meeting or things like that. But I found myself procrastinating long tasks a lot because: “I don’t have time for that now, I only have half an hour and I need two”, or: “This talk should take me two hours, but this one of 30 minutes looks more important (lie!)”. So I removed the time-based tags, but not the class ones.
So now let’s go to my latest setup (until today because I made a very big change that I may talk about in a few weeks, if it works). Only two kinds of contexts: physical and class. In the physical contexts, I have the following: Desk (things I have to do on my computer), Errands, Home, Calls, Mobile (things I can do on a phone), and Switch (for video games that I’m playing on my Nintendo Switch). In the class contexts, I had: Work1, Work2, Work3 (I have three kinds of work tasks for different parts of my job), Finance (for finance-related tasks), Career (for tasks that can help my career), Personal Time (for tasks that are not related to my career but help my growth in any other way), Chores (tasks I have to do), and Free Time (leisure tasks).
Also, I added four different levels of priority per task. Those were: Urgent, Important, Necessary, and Optional. I don’t think they need much of an explanation, but “Important” doesn’t mean it is important for the job or it is urgent, but if it’s going to make me grow. And “Necessary” means that I have to do it, but it is not something I consider important for me or at the time of my life I am. And “Urgent” doesn’t mean that they are more important than “Important”, it’s just that the deadline is around the corner. A lot of tasks jump from “Necessary” to “Urgent” without going through “Important”. So when I have to work, I try to get rid of the urgent stuff first and then spend most of the time on the important stuff. If I have time, I do some necessary, and optional tasks.
To know when to work on what, I did some Day Theming. So depending on the day of the week, I worked on Career or Personal or Chores tasks, etc. And that has been working for me for a while. But I still feel from time to time that anxiety of “am I working on the most important thing for me right now?”. So today I made a big change. Let’s see if it works and maybe I write another post about it in the future.
I know I used the Eat The Frog method for a while as well, but don’t remember exactly how and when. Either way, I wanted to give it a shoutout because it is very interesting. In summary, it means: do the task you have to do that you don’t want to do first thing in the morning.
So that’s it for the story of my productivity until today, 22nd of December of 2023. This is my last post of the year, so if you celebrate something: Happy Holidays! And if you use the same calendar as me, Happy New Year!!
Last week I said I wanted to share some productivity blogs I read, so here they are:
- Todoist’s blog: https://todoist.com/inspiration
- James Clear’s blog (author of Atomic Habits): https://jamesclear.com/
- Cal Newport’s blog (author of Deep Work): https://calnewport.com/blog
PS: You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about tools in these two posts (although you might know already what tool I use because of the links and previous posts). It’s on purpose! Because my next post in the series “My Productivity Story” is going to be about the tools I have used all these years.